Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [6]
The Foote family gave McMurray the papers with the understanding that he was going to publish from them and that he would supply typed transcriptions of the letters to the family. McMurray planned to do the dissertation under Stegner’s direction, but a decade went by with no progress, and he finally gave up. During the mid- 1960s, Stegner borrowed the transcriptions from the library and took them with him to his summer home in Vermont to read.
Reading her quaintly 19th century letters, I thought her interesting but certainly not the subject of a novel. She lay around in my mind an unfertilized egg. . . . What hatched, after three years, was a novel about time, about cultural transplantation and change, about the relations of a man with his ancestors and descendants.
He did not want to write a historical novel (as he commented on several occasions, western literature was too often “mired in the past”), but a contemporary one, and as he thought about the story in the Foote letters, it occurred to him that perhaps he could somehow link the two together so that the past was made part of the present. That, in turn, led him to look for the sort of narrator that had “tunnel vision,” frequently focused on the past and thinking about the present in terms of the past.
The perfect model for what became his narrator, Lyman Ward, presented itself to him in the person of Norman Foerster, Stegner’s dissertation adviser at the University of Iowa, who had come to the Stanford campus to retire. Foerster, unfortunately, had been struck by a disease that had paralyzed his legs. With some sorrow about what had happened to his old friend, Stegner nevertheless put himself into Foerster’s place—how would he, a largely immobile literary historian, view the world? As the novelist has said, “We all have to have in some degree what Keats called negative capability, the capacity to make ourselves at home in other skins.” Here was the tunnel vision that Stegner was looking for.
Foerster did not provide a character—Stegner invented him, descended from Joe Allston—but a point of view, literally a position from which to view the world. In comparing Allston with Lyman Ward, Stegner notes that Allston and Ward are very different types. Allston is
more emotional than Ward, less over-controlled. Lyman Ward is pretty uptight all the time. Joe Allston is likely to get drunk and disorderly and to wisecrack in the wrong places. He’s another kind of character, but he has some of the same functions as a literary device.
Observer and commentator, Lyman Ward, immobile, travels through time and space via his mind’s eye, which of course is precisely what a novelist does. He is not immobilized by just his disease, which does allow him to move about in his wheelchair, but also by his attachment to place, his ancestral home, and by his obsession with his family’s history. Both literally and figuratively, he lives in the past. While one cannot agree with Lyman’s son, Rodman, that his father’s investigation of the past is a waste of time, his devotion does seem extreme—except when one realizes that his devotion is not just to the past for its own sake, but that he is also looking for guidance in his present situation. The subject of Angle of Repose is the life of Susan Burling Ward, but the essence of the novel is the evolving consciousness of Lyman Ward, her grandson.
The novel can be roughly divided into two parts. The first third of the novel deals largely with Lyman Ward and his experiences and thoughts about his life. Lyman’s story and his character (a contemporary man who can understand and sympathize with a Victorian lady) frame the remaining two-thirds, which deals with his grandmother and whose state of mind is often